Basically, the president’s defense today has been Ken Starr fatuously railing against the use of impeachment, another lawyer defending Rudy Giuliani, some nonsense about the process being unfair, Pam Bondi smearing Joe Biden and some lawyer basically arguing for a retroactive impeachment of Obama and scolding the House Managers for failing to pass the president’s agenda instead of impeaching him.
They are utterly shameless:
At the heart of Congress’ probe into the president’s actions is his claim that former Vice President and 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden strong-armed the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor in order to thwart an investigation into a company tied to his son, Hunter Biden.
But sources ranging from former Obama administration officials to an anti-corruption advocate in Ukraine say the official, Viktor Shokin, was ousted for the opposite reason Trump and his allies claim.
It wasn’t because Shokin was investigating a natural gas company tied to Biden’s son; it was because Shokin wasn’t pursuing corruption among the country’s politicians, according to a Ukrainian official and four former American officials who specialized in Ukraine and Europe.
Shokin’s inaction prompted international calls for his ouster and ultimately resulted in his removal by Ukraine’s parliament. Without pressure from Joe Biden, European diplomats, the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations, Shokin would not have been fired, said Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder and executive director of the Anti Corruption Action Centre in Kiev.
“Civil society organizations in Ukraine were pressing for his resignation,” Kaleniuk said, “but no one would have cared if there had not been voices from outside this country calling on him to go.” In a July phone call, Trump asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Biden’s actions.
That prompted a whistleblower to accuse Trump of asking a foreign government to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry. The actions at the center of Trump’s allegation occurred in late 2015 and early 2016, when U.S. aid was critical to Ukraine. Russia had seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and was supporting separatists who were fighting Ukrainian forces in the eastern part of the country.
Biden took an interest in Ukraine, said Steven Pifer, a William J. Perry fellow at Stanford University and former ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “You saw the vice president begin to emerge as really sort of the senior policy lead on Ukraine,” Pifer said. “It’s good to have attention at that level.” At one point, Biden withheld $1 billion in aid to Ukraine to pressure the government to remove Shokin from the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claim Biden did this to quash Shokin’s investigation into Ukraine’s largest gas company, Burisma Holdings, and its owner, oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. They say this benefited Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who served on Burisma’s board of directors – for which he was paid $50,000 a month.
Their assertion is contradicted by former diplomatic officials who were following the issue at the time. Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin’s ouster, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency set up in 2014 that has worked closely with the FBI.
Shokin’s office had investigated Burisma, but the probe focused on a period before Hunter Biden joined the company, according to the anti-corruption bureau. The investigation dealt with the Ministry of Ecology, which allegedly granted special permits to Burisma between 2010 and 2012, the agency said. Hunter Biden did not join the company until 2014.
Critics of Hunter Biden have questioned how he landed such a lucrative role with no experience in Ukraine or the gas industry. But it’s not unusual for Ukrainian companies to bring on high-profile people from the West in an effort to burnish their image and gain influence, Pifer said. Cofer Black, who served as Bush’s CIA counterterrorism chief, joined Burisma’s board in 2017.
There is no evidence Hunter Biden did anything wrong, said Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who succeeded Shokin. However, Lutsenko, who’s also faced criticism for his actions as prosecutor, supported Trump’s claim before changing his story. He resigned as prosecutor in August. The Burisma investigation ended with a settlement and a fine paid by one of the firm’s accountants, according to Sergii Leshchenko, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who spearheaded anti-corruption efforts under former President Petro Poroshenko.
Jesus. Here’s fact-checker Daniel Dale on Bondi’s outrageously disingenuous presentation:
Here are four key facts Bondi omitted:
1. Shokin’s former deputy, Vitaliy Kasko, said the investigation into Burisma and company owner Mykola Zlochevsky was inactive at the time of Joe Biden’s pressure in late 2015 and early 2016. A leading Ukrainian anti-corruption activist said the same.
“Shokin was not investigating. He didn’t want to investigate Burisma,” Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of Ukraine’s Anti-Corruption Action Center, told the Washington Post for a July article. “And Shokin was fired not because he wanted to do that investigation, but quite to the contrary, because he failed that investigation.”
2. Shokin was widely seen — by Ukrainian activists, US diplomats, European governments and the International Monetary Fund — as ineffective or corrupt. In a speech in 2015, Geoffrey Pyatt, then the US ambassador to Ukraine, castigated Shokin’s office for impeding the investigation of Burisma’s owner Zlochevsky. Pyatt called for people in Shokin’s office to be fired, “at minimum.”
“Rather than supporting Ukraine’s reforms and working to root out corruption, corrupt actors within the prosecutor general’s office are making things worse by openly and aggressively undermining reform,” Pyatt said.
3. Biden was acting in accordance with official US policy. Because of Shokin’s reputation, the US and its allies believed that removing him would increase, not decrease, the chances of people like Zlochevsky being pursued.
“What former Vice President Biden requested of former president of Ukraine, (Petro) Poroshenko, was the removal of a corrupt prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin,” George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs, testified in the impeachment inquiry. Kent went on to say Shokin had “undermined” a US-funded program to try to investigate corrupt Ukrainian prosecutors.
4. Some Republican senators had also demanded changes to the prosecutor general’s office Shokin led.
In a bipartisan 2016 letter, Republican senators Rob Portman, Mark Kirk and Ron Johnson joined Democratic colleagues in calling on then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to “press ahead with urgent reforms to the Prosecutor General’s office and judiciary.”
I don’t care much about Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, but this dishonest crapola is outrageous.
They could make the argument that Trump did something wrong but it’s not impeachable and there wouldn’t be much anyone could do about it. That determination is left to senators to decide and while I’d disagree with them, it’s not something based totally upon outright lies and smears. But Trump won’t let them and they seem to be fine with doing it his way.
These people are making a Trumpian mockery of the constitution and it’s damned depressing. I don’t know how you put this lying, evil genie back in the bottle